Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

The Power of “What If” Questions
Content from authors Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
We often have trouble conceiving innovative business models because we are held back in our thinking by status quo. The status quo stifles imagination. One way to overcome this problem is to challenge conventional assumptions with “what if” questions. With the right business model ingredients, what we think of as impossible might just be doable. “What if” questions help us break free of constraints imposed by current business models. They should provoke us and challenge our thinking. They should disturb us as intriguing, difficult-to-execute propositions.

What if...
…furniture buyers picked up components in flat pack form from a large warehouse and assembled the products themselves in their homes? What is common practice today was unthinkable until IKEA introduced the concept in the 1960’s.

…airlines didn’t buy engines for their airplanes, but paid for every hour an engine runs? That is how Rolls-Royce transformed itself from a money-losing British manufacturer into a service firm that today is the world’s second biggest provider of large jet engines.

…voice calls were free worldwide? In 2003 Skype launched a service that allowed free voice calling via the internet. After five years, Skype had acquired 400 million registered users who collectively had made 100 billion free phone calls.